Whatever Happened to the Carpal Tunnel Epidemic? (Ep. 138)

This week’s episode asks “Whatever Happened to the Carpal Tunnel Epidemic?” (You can subscribe at iTunes, get the RSS feed, or listen via the media player above. You can also read the transcript; it includes credits for the music you’ll hear in the episode.)

Stephen Dubner recalls his days at The New York Times (where he wrote stuff like this, this, and this), when newsrooms were full of two kinds of people: those suffering from wrist pain and those who feared they soon would. Many people had some sort of elaborate computer keyboard setup to remedy the situation -- including Steve Levitt, who used a keyboard that folded up in the middle to ease his wrist pain. (He'd been keying in hours and hours of data. Levitt claims it was worth it, by the way: the data led to a paper about campaign spending, which he says was his “first good journal publication.”)

So where did all those white-collar carpal tunnel syndrome victims go?